Adding Year-Round Interest to Your Garden

By Ava Green

Spring brings excitement and the hope of fresh beginnings, but also the harsh reality that our gardens can look a little…well…blah, in between seasons. Even when you have evergreens, well shaped trees, shrubs or perennials with “good bones” (strong framework or structure) a garden can look bare off season. This is when garden features and ornaments can really make a dramatic difference!

Create Year-Round Interest In Your Garden

Do you have a spot in the garden where plants struggle to grow? Or an area where you feel like your garden is missing something? 

Items like benches, patios, ornamental urns, decorative fencing, statues, a pond, gazing balls, birdhouses and birdbaths add beauty and function in every season. In Southern Ontario’s long shoulder seasons (early spring, late fall, and the longest of all - winter) these permanent elements help to make your garden look inviting all year.

Why Every Garden Benefits from a Focal Point

A garden filled with colourful annuals and perennials can be stunning, but without a focal point, it can feel visually overwhelming. A garden focal point like a bench, statement urn, a piece of statuary, or a water feature draws your attention, and creates a sense of purpose.

Focal points guide movement through the garden and help tell a story, leading visitors toward a destination. While naturalized gardens and wildflower areas don’t always require structure, for gardeners who prefer a more organized look, incorporating a focal point can create a sense of order and transform your space.

Add Contrast With Texture and Shape

Many gardeners naturally gravitate toward favourite plant forms. Tall, spiky perennials like coneflowers, salvia, and Black-eyed Susan are popular in Ontario gardens but they can feel repetitive when planted together.

Introducing contrast changes everything. A round birdbath nestled among upright perennials adds softness and contrast making it more visually interesting. In shady gardens dominated by hostas, a tall iron obelisk or trellis creates height and drama. Mixing plant textures with garden features like lighting instantly elevates beds and borders.

Express Your Personality!

Gardening is a creative process, and experimentation is part of the joy. Moving plants to find the right light or shelter often leads to surprising combinations and successes. Garden features allow you to express that creativity even further.

Statuary, ornaments, and structures, whether handcrafted or purchased, add personality and meaning. From whimsical accents to bold architectural elements, these features bring height, structure, and style to your garden in ways plants alone can’t.

More Than Just Flowers

Flowers bloom and fade with the seasons here in Southern Ontario. Garden features provide continuity, offering year-round interest, structure, and charm. With just a few additional elements, your garden can look beautiful in every season, not just when it’s in bloom.

By: Dave Zeldon and Ely Schweyer with tips from Mary K, Zach C, Sandy M, and Jeanine LT!

Now is the time to prep our outdoor landscapes for the coming cold weather and the ensuing spring! Perhaps your autumn is calmer than your spring, and this is the best time to clean up and begin new projects. The following are some simple but effective tips to get your yard winter-ready - so your spring will be a little more pleasant for you!

Planting

When warm weather still allows it, plant trees, shrubs, perennials, and bulbs to allow them to establish for budding and blooming next spring.

Pond Care

Mary, our perennials gal, suggests not removing any water from your pond but instead aerating it all winter. She skims out the leaves to maintain the balance of the nitrogen cycle in the water and suggests waiting to do a big pond clean out in the spring, as that’s when the water’s culture can bounce back easier.

Fertilizing

After top growth of your landscape plants ceases, reduce your annual fertilizer application by up to half of the requirement. Autumn is a major root growth period for woody and herbaceous perennials; roots will grow and absorb nutrients whenever soil temperatures remain above 5 °C but can be over fertilized quickly in these cooling temperatures.

Produce gardens could benefit at this time from a top layer of compost that will break down during the winter so it isn't too 'hot' for spring planting.

Leaf Litter

Here’s our pitch on the ‘leave it – don’t leave it’ debate: It DEPENDS.

   Ideally, we should leave litter leaf on the ground for our pollinator friends and endangered species like fireflies to hide out in the winter. But, there are appropriate situations in which to remove leaf litter.

• When they’re covering your bulbs and tender perennials, remove SOME. Leaf litter acts as a ground insulant, which can amplify our temperamental zone 6b temperatures. This freezing and thawing can often confuse and kill early spring bulbs and tender perennials.

• Zach, our trees and shrubs guy, suggests that if a tree shedding leaves has been diagnosed with pests and fungi, remove the leaf matter to reduce the spread to other plants. Diseased matter should always be removed in a quarantined fashion and taken to a landfill or burned.

☝️Please note: Unless diseased, compost your leaves, they contain vital nutrients specific to the plants they came from!

Lawncare

With autumn mowing practices you have the opportunity for the addition of much needed organic matter for your lawn, which is also an excellent source of slow release nutrients. Keep mower blades sharp since leaves can be tougher than grass. Raise the mower height up and mow leaves when they are lightly wet (e.g., morning dew). This will keep the leaves from blowing all over and will prevent the mower from getting bogged down in wet leaves.

See more on general lawncare in Dave's Lawncare 101 post.

Clean Up

Now is a good time to wash your tools with soap and water to prevent diseases spreading from plant to plant.

  ☝️Mary's tip is to spray garden tools with PAM before use, so the dirt slides right off them!

Pruning Perennials

Mary, our perennials gal, suggests leaving things until frost to cut back. This way they're easier to compost. Make sure to leave seedheads (i.e., coneflowers and black-eyed Susans) for wildlife, and things like hydrangeas for winter interest.

☝️Make sure if things are cut back, to leave them sticking up enough you can still find them in the spring!

Dividing and Moving Perennials

Moving or dividing perennials in the autumn is a great way to reduce your work next spring. The cool, moist weather is an ideal time for perennial roots to become well established.

👍The rule of green thumb for moving perennials: If the plant blooms between early spring and late June, then early fall division/moving is ideal. If the plant blooms after late June, then early spring division is ideal (except for Peonies which should only moved or divided in the fall, Poppies in August, Irises in July & Lilies in the Fall).

Overwintering Trees

Zach and Sandy from trees and shrubs suggest a couple of things to help your favourite trees along this winter:

• To reduce winter injury in evergreens: Keep properly watered throughout the growing season and into the fall is another way to reduce winter injury. Decrease watering slightly in September to encourage hardening off, then water thoroughly in October until freeze-up.

• Cedars - Spray cedars with antidesiccant spray (available at Eising GC) or wrap in burlap (with stakes to create dead air space) so wind doesn't dry out and burn tips.

• Fruit trees - In late fall, spray fruit trees with sulfur-horticultural oil (available at Eising GC) for protection against fungi and pests overwintering in the bark.

• Ornamental trees - wrap the base of young trees to protect from chewing rodents. 

• Pruning trees - trees that prefer winter pruning rather than spring pruning are maples, oaks, birches, and elms, as well as with fruiting trees such as apples and pears. This ensures blight and pests will not affect the tree's open wounds.

If you missed the frosty deadline for transplanting trees, Sandy suggests insulating unplanted potted trees to help them best survive the coming winter. Here are some methods:

• Double-pot your tree with an insulative barrier (i.e., burlap, straw, mulch, etc.) stuffed between the two pots and securely cover the top with tarp to deflect moisture.

• Bury your potted tree in the ground, level with the top of the pot (don’t forget to dig it back up!) and mulch the area.

• Huddle all of your unplanted trees and plants together when using the above methods.

Mulching

Mulching is one of the simplest and most beneficial practices you can do for your garden. Just by simply placing a protective layer of material over the bare soil will benefit the soil as it decomposes providing the much-needed organic matter which improves root growth, the infiltration of water and the nutrient-holding capacity of the soil while reducing soil erosion.

   A good layer of mulch allows the soil to warm more slowly in the spring, so perennials aren't fooled into breaking dormancy too early, as you want the ground to stay cold until it really is spring!

☝️Make sure your mulch application won't stunt the growth of your plants come spring as discussed in our Transplant Troubleshooting blog post!

Japanese Beetle Prevention

Nematodes are microscopic worms that should be applied to lawns that have been ravaged by grubs especially of the Japanese Beetle. Nematodes have a short shelf life and must be refrigerated until they are applied. Normally, they are sprayed onto the lawn from mid-May to mid-June and then again (for best practice) from mid-August to mid-September.

Pots

To prevent freezing and cracking, Mary suggests emptying and turning your pots upside down. You can disinfect at this time too. 

Design Time!

Jeanine, from production, suggests writing down what worked best in your produce garden this year so you can implement it again in the spring.

With the trees and land being barren enough you can see its contour, now is a great time to plan ahead for spring landscaping! Don't forget Eising GC would love to offer help with your landscape designing!

We hope these tips help your landscape plants enjoy your winter abode as much as you do this season, for more information - and plants – visit Eising Greenhouse and Garden Centre! 🍁

Fresh evergreen decor has the amazing double impact of visual beauty and nostalgic aroma, bringing back old holiday memories each time you walk past and catch a whiff of its invigorating pine scent. For those with a knack for crafts and creative designs, making your own DIY decor is such a fun way to add a personal touch to your winter holiday decor. You can pick a theme or a colour scheme and then customize all your decorations accordingly, for a picture-perfect look that would put Chip and Joanna Gaines to shame. 

 

Here are some creative ideas and tips for using evergreen cuttings in your DIY holiday decor projects. Let’s get ready to deck some halls!

The Best Greenery for Wreaths

Wreaths are pretty much the quintessential winter decor piece for indoors and outdoors, with endless ways to customize the look and add beautiful accents. But, depending on the kind of look you want to achieve and where you’re planning on hanging the wreath, you’ll need to choose the right type of greenery, or else you could end up with a brown wreath that drops needles faster than ‘90s pop stars drop their Christmas albums. 

We recommend using either cedar or Fraser fir cuttings for indoor wreaths, as they are very heat-tolerant and won’t turn brown if placed near a warm vent. Cedar has an exceptionally potent citrus-like scent that we can’t get enough of! We also love the look of fresh or dried eucalyptus for more modern, minimalist wreaths—especially if you want to keep them up well past December. 

Outdoor wreaths require cold-hardy cuttings like juniper, pine, or spruce. Juniper is quite distinctive, as it has little blue berries all over it, but you’ll want to take care when handling it, as its needles are pretty pointy. Spruce is similarly sharp, so some protective gloves are a good idea! Pine is a bit more on the delicate side, so it isn’t as great for holding heavy ornaments, but its long needles and wispy, shaggy appearance is very in style. 

If you prefer the look of a leafy wreath instead of one that’s covered in little green needles, try making a boxwood wreath! The little loonie-shaped leaves of this adorable evergreen can even be preserved in glycerin if you’d like to keep it for longer than a few weeks. 
 

How to Decorate Outdoor Pots for Christmas

Outdoor Christmas potted arrangements are the perfect way to boost winter curb appeal and make your home’s entrance look warm and welcoming. When curating arrangements for your Christmas pots, use the same kind of design formula as you would with a live container arrangement: use tall, upright branches and cuttings for the center or back of the pot for the best visibility, add shaggier, trailing cuttings around the edges to spill out down the sides. Then, fill up the gaps in the middle with more mounded plants or cute holiday accents!  

Plain, leafless branches actually look quite elegant when surrounded by lush evergreen cuttings, and they add a cool architectural effect. Bright red dogwood branches add a festive pop of colour, and thicker birch branches have more of a rustic vibe. 

You can get extra creative when it comes to choosing decorative add-ons and accents! Shiny ribbons and glassy ornaments bring that classic opulent holiday spirit, whereas natural accents like lotus seed pods, berries and pinecones look more woodsy and lush. We’ve got it all at Eising, so come browse our full selection of decorations to get some inspiration!

4 Creative Ideas for Evergreen Decor

Looking for something a little different than the classic wreaths and garlands? Try out some of these cute DIY decorations for the winter season. 

Fresh Evergreen Swags

Big, dramatic door swags are such a fun alternative to wreaths, and you don’t have to be as careful about making sure everything is perfectly in place. The more shaggy and voluminous, the better! Swags look best when there’s a large, decorative accent as the main focal point at the top, with long tails of evergreen cuttings hanging down from under it. Ribbons and pinecones are the most common topper for door swags, but lately we’ve really been loving the look of silk flowers instead, for an elegant, feminine touch. 

Kissing Balls

These adorable hanging balls or meant to be dangled from door frames in lieu of the traditional cutting of mistletoe. First, start with a potato! Attach a loop of twine to a screw and twist it into the potato to anchor it in. Then, stick in a bunch of boxwood sprigs all over so the spud is completely covered, and then trim it so it’s a perfect sphere. Add little accents like berries or ribbons. Finally, hook the loop over your doorway to hang the decoration. The moisture from the potato will help keep the leaves alive longer! 

Gift Tags

For a lovely special touch to top off each of the presents under the tree, attach little cuttings onto the gift tags with a piece of twine or ribbon. It’s the easiest way to take a wrapped gift from simple to sensational! 

Mini Wreath Mobiles

Instead of one large wreath, make several small wreaths that vary slightly in size, and suspend them from a large branch or piece of driftwood. Hang it on the wall for a cute, boho decor piece that’s sure to garner many compliments!

Eager to blast some holiday tunes and start decorating? Eising has all sorts of cuttings and winter plants available now for your DIY evergreen decor projects, so visit the shop soon to snatch some up while supplies last!